The Teaching Of Amenemope

March 4, 2012 12:53 pm Views: 191

AmenemopeInstructing his son in uprightness and honesty in governmental positions of trust, this African teacher called by many the “son of man” and by others Amenemope. This seer exalted conscience to its highest pinnacle of arbitrament between right and wrong.
Amenemope taught that riches and fortune were the gift of God, and this concept thoroughly colored the later appearing Hebrew philosophy. This noble teacher believed that God-consciousness was the determining factor in all conduct; that every moment should be lived in the realization of the presence of, and responsibility to, God. The teachings of this sage were subsequently translated into Hebrew and became the sacred book long before the Old Testament was reduced to writing.
This wise man of the Nile taught that “riches take themselves wings and fly away”– ” He exhorted all
to turn away from “the words of men” to “the acts of God.” In substance he taught: Man proposes but God disposes. He wrote the first psalm. His teachings, translated into Hebrew, determined the philosophy of the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. Translated into Greek, they gave color to all subsequent Hellenic religious philosophy, the Alexandrian book of philosopher. Philo possessed a copy of the Book of Wisdom.
Amenemope functioned to conserve the ethics of evolution and the morals of revelation and in his
writings passed them on both to the Hebrews and to the Greeks., but he was the most influential in that he colored the subsequent thought of two vital links in the growth of Occidental civilization–the Hebrews, among whom evolved the acme of Occidental religious faith, and the Greeks. For example, in the Book of Proverbs, chapters fifteen, seventeen, twenty, and chapter twenty-two, verse seventeen, to chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-two, are taken almost word for word from Amenemope’s Book of Wisdom which Philo put his name on.
Amenemope TRENCH TOWN PRESS